Five years ago, on October 14th, 1996, Matthias Ettrich delivered his famous newsgroup posting (alsoHTMLized), and spawned a new era in the history of desktop environments. I think that a simple look at www.kde.org and all its related sites will show everybody just what has happened in the last five years. Congratulations to KDE, and here's to future growth and success! Update: 10/15 10:15 AM by N: Rob Kaper obliges with photos of some developers celebrating this occasion. Charles Samuel goes nostalgic with a screenshot of KDE 2.0pre. Finally, LinuxToday, Slashdot, and even Gnotices join us in celebrating this event.

But many things changed: I remember, when I installed my first 0.4 binary sometime in '97 (you know: Kalles famous c't-article): What a difference between this and fvwm95. This was the first thing I installed alone. I was used to _work_ with SunOS und Linux but installation-things??

These days I started learning Linux. My programming skills were not good enough to help the project - I was one of these silent users. Today I know much more about Linux and KDE. I try to help and try to promote KDE-Linux.

Why KDE is not referred as Kool Desktop Environment, even when It's name was chosen by Matthias E.? I find is very stupid in the tip of the day that "K" in "KDE" stands for nothing! Let me correct it, it stands for "Kool" (cool), the first posting of M.E. has the title "New Project: Kool Desktop Environment (KDE)".

Happy Birthday to KDE and every one cheers! BTW I like the new slogan "KDE 3.0: ready for the Desktop". I appreciate KDE teams' hard work and dedication. Thank you!

Hmm, too bad You missed our party. It was really great!! We should do it again in the near future!!
Where were the banners?
Well there weren't any. We just looked in all the KDE-mailinglists and irc for Dutch KDE-developers/volunteers, and invited them to the party.

I use KDE on most of my Linux systems (including my Dell Laptop). Its great, however, its hard to figure out how to do an upgrade - The install information points me all over the place and what worked for a previous update doesn't seem to work for newer updates. I use KDE almost everyday and have for the last 2 1/2 years. I really like it and want to keep it current. Help me do that!

yeah okay. KDE Rox, but Gnome is mightyful (is that a word?) also.
There's no point in saying, "this sux, this rox".
Both Gnome and KDE developers are working very hard.
So they deserve all the credit.
I must add to this that KDE continues to grow with an unseen speed.
But then again, loozing eazel was a big disaster for gnome.
Nevertheless the gnome developers continue to work, so they deserve respect.

You don't seem to understand. The whole KDE vs. GNOME thing is a stupid user debate. Developers do not care. That is why GNOME has posted an article on KDE's 5th birthday as well. We should work towards integration, and not fight over everything. Hopefully, when Berlin becomes stable, we will be able to make a new toolkit, combining the advantages of both (with wrappers for the different opinions, of course). I use gnome, but that doesn't mean I don't have KDE installed, that I hate KDE, or that I am in any way using an inferior or superior desktop (I just like the interface better).

Ok, when Berlin is stable...
and fast enough for daily work.
So, let's say in approx. 10 years ;-)
And then we will have new toolkits, since it's quite different, everything can be 3D, translucent and so on.
Maybe a real new GUI experience.

That's the distro's fault. There's really no good way that KDE could provide any sort of installation type tool seperate from xyz distro's packaging system without causing massive mayhem, since the distros are packaging their own binaries anyways. KDE provides only source.

I've missed that original posting because there wasn't a usable news feed here in Namibia. I remember discussing LyX with a friend in Austria in the begin of 1997 by email and then he mentioned that Matthias started another project: KDE. I wasn't much impressed at first but after going to www.kde.org and downloading KDE (note: compiled it on a 486-66 with 16MB) I tried it out and was hooked immediately. It completely changed my view of X programming. I had tried it a coupla times before but always gave up on it. Now, with KDE and Qt, it was so easy to write applications with a pretty GUI. Thanks to TT and the handful of original KDE developers who took this up!

To the next 5 years of KDE development after which, I guess, this beast will no only be able to notify me when my tea is ready but to make the tea.

I swear I had my hands on a script which did exactly that, communicate to your eTea-Machine via the parport and print the status messages in KNewsTicker's scrolltext. Pity I can't remember where it is (probably put it in the same dir as the focus-follows-mind script which says 'You really sure you want to type there, making a fool out of yerself?' whenever you've been caught typing in the wrong window).

They even congratulate KDE on the Gnotices web page. I think this is great as it shows that the people really involved with these two desktop projects are much more mature than the trolls on both sides. Very honorable move, Gnotices!

All KDE needs to do now is to slow it a bit, or perhaps do it like th linux kerneland have a bunch that maintainsa branch to get it a bug free as possible. then new features can be added in the experimental tree and when it is released, move into a temporary bug crushing mode, once it has gotten pretty stable move to the next experimental and give old branch into maintanence.....the old way has definatly given KDE all it has but it has also made it buggy. I think that the move could be done after 3.0 and all you would need is to give the maintanence to one person on each subproject.

Probably not ;-)
All bug fixes which are applied to the "stable" branch are also applied to the "experimental" branch. I don't think many developers will continue to use KDE 2.x once KDE 3.0 is released.
We will have a KDE 2.2.2, maybe a 2.2.3, and that will probably be all.
Then look forward to KDE 3 :-)

Bye
Alex

P.S. 2.2.2 will be be very stable and contain very much bug fixes as far as I can say

well, thats good to know. when I read about going from 2.2.1 to 3.0 I was thinking "but the bugs are not cruhed hear yet" at the rate that bugs are crushed by you guys, 2.2.2 would be very stable and 2.2.3 would be almost perfect I am sure.

I hope 3.0 is faster than 2.2.x...and KHTML needs a speed up, its starting to act like MSHTML.

its sort of funny, you look eveywhere in the OSS community and you see realy good features, you just don't see all the realy good features in one place.